


these teeth are a ladder

by anthrop



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestor-Era, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 08:58:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4473215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no such thing as choice for your kind, for the will-be rainbow drinking servants to a mother of monsters. There is only the thirst, and a timeline stretching on through the sweeps, and on, and on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	these teeth are a ladder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashanimus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashanimus/gifts).



> Title comes from Bjork's [Mouth's Cradle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7-9QSwll0o).

The Matrona says, “There are four things that may happen when we die.” Her voice is steady and clear, easily heard over the buzzing needles. “Ideally, when the body is injured beyond saving, we die. But it is a false death, a temporary lie. It is in truth a transformation. It is a metamorphosis that no other caste can ever experience.”

She speaks here, now, as she does down in the brooding caverns, awaiting some small input before continuing a lecture to ensure maximum attention. When you don’t provide her that input quick enough to satisfy her pacing she presses down until your shoulder throbs.

Your throat is very dry; it takes two swallows before you can rasp, “What happens?”

Placated, she moves on, peels your clenched fist open to relax your arm. Every mark must be perfect. “We shine,” she says, reverently. For a moment her naked forearms flicker white-gray-white. “We remain obedient to the Mother and to the Empress, and so our strength and our lifespans are made tenfold. We shine for the rest of our long sweeps, and when at last we die a true death our bodies are given to the Mother to consume.”

She wipes the needles on a jade-damp cloth, talking without looking at you. “But the molt is not always kind, and sometimes we are deemed unworthy of this gift. Sometimes we die, and all that happens is the rot. Those of us that fail to shine are burned, and the ashes scattered in the desert where the shadow droppers shamble.”

There are three other high-ranking auxiliatrices penning the complex spirals and swirls of servitude into your limbs. Your muscles shake helplessly, your mind chafes at the constant buzz, like the thrumming of the Mother Grub’s wings. There’s a raw blister on your heel one troll doesn’t bother to be gentle with as she twists your leg to a more convenient angle. You grit your teeth and say nothing.

The Matrona continues, unhurried. “Sometimes the body is overeager. Sometimes the body fills up with more light than it can hold. Too often one of us will split at our weakest points, expose bleached white muscle and crystallized bone. There is no saving those of us who shine too much. It is a sight both beautiful and terrible to witness.”

“Dangerous,” you correct hoarsely, and she nods.  
  
“Too dangerous,” she agrees, rearranging the cloth draped over your chest to work on your collarbone. You’re grateful for what little modesty provided you, even if she'll have to remove it soon to etch curls around your breasts. “The mind can’t handle the strain. Those trolls go insane to a one. What do we do with them?”

“Ah--” A cold breeze whips across the hilltop. Shivers rake up your skin, makes your jaw click shut. You understand the necessity of being naked now, but you still wish they’d chosen a warmer perigree for this. Even the dim white sun hanging overhead cannot keep you from shaking. “We--we put them down, and we leave their entrails for the birds.”

“Correct.” She sets her needle down, sits on the cold obsidian slab beside you and squeezes your thigh. It might be intended as a comforting gesture. It might only mean she’s hungry.  
  


“What is the last?” you ask. Not because you don’t know. These words, these motions, this whole bloody ceremony has been drilled into you and every jadeblooded troll going back who-knows how long. You ask because it is expected of you to ask. If you play along this might just be over with before the sun rises.

The Matrona bends, gently presses her swollen mouth to lay a kiss on the curve of your tattooed and bloody ribs, where gills would yawn if you were royalty. Stained glass wings bow her spine. Her eyes are jade across the sclera and her impassive face is run through with seams, like a broken plate glued back together. Fleshless claws prickle your raw skin.

“Sometimes we become Mothers."

* * *

The day your lusus died, the rainbow drinkers came for you. Jadebloods, like you, but changed. Frightening in their distance, clinical and cold in the disinterested glances they’d cast at the ragged hole you’d sawn open in your lusus’ exoskeleton. They’d been white as starlight even at high noon, and their hands had been as unforgiving as steel. You’d known someone would come to take you way, to take you down into the brooding caverns where you would not see sunlight nor moonslight for two long sweeps, if you were lucky. You’d been told as such long before this. It was tradition. It was mandatory.

You just thought you’d be allowed a little time to grieve, that’s all.

Down in the caverns, you were taken to the Matrona and her high acolytes, and through every well-worn tunnel you walked eyes followed you with an interest that felt too much like hunger. At six sweeps old you were half the height of even the youngest fresh out of their adult molts, and all the stories you read as a wriggler said if you could see the butter-yellow of a rainbow drinker’s eyes, you were as good as dead. At six sweeps old you walked among the dead and dying, the Burning Children of She Who Births the Legions, and felt no fear. Jade doesn’t spill its own, as the saying goes.

Still, it’s one thing to know you were hatched to become a servant to the Mother Grub due solely to the color of your blood. It’s another thing entirely to see the end result baring overlong white fangs as you pass, inhaling the fear-stained smell of your heartbeat, humming songs without breath to sooth the Mother above.

In the Matrona’s respiteblock--warn, warm stone draped in brightly dyed and decorated fabrics--her insectile eyes settled with a tangible weight upon you. Even then, two sweeps past, she had been frightening; warped by the Mother and made brittle-boned and weary by the Empress, she was older than anyone you had ever known. After a tense moment she waved everyone away, then hooked her long fingers into your shoulder and sat you down for tea.

“I had wondered when you would walk among us,” she had said, and told you the story of the day the sky fell and fire burned the unwary. Six sweeps past, a meteor slipped through Alternia’s upper atmospheric defenses and struck a wing of the brooding caverns. A third of your clutch’s greenbloods died in the inferno, and when at last the blaze had died and the attendants dared approach, they found something miraculous. There, sleeping atop the meteor’s pitted surface as if had been hatched there, lay a single jade grub.

You.

“Oh yes,” the Matrona said, sipping her tea, “I expect great things from you.”

* * *

They give you a respiteblock, a perfect square hole deep underground, dusty with disuse. The recuperacoon is half the size of your old one, the sopor always too hot to sleep comfortably. You share an ablutionblock with twelve other women and two men. Meals are grown within the brooding caverns; in two perigrees you’re already sick of the taste of mushrooms.

They give you garments; the sturdy, plain garb of an acolyte, black and jade stripes, tall boots, long gloves, a leather apron. It will be a long time before you can wear the delicate gown of a high auxiliatrix. For now, there’s work to be done.

They give you songs and stories, rhymes and rhythms. History lessons, and etiquette, but also ways to drive out the silence that creeps in and settles like the putrid reek of a sun soaked corpse. Even still, one of the three males in your generation, the highest number in three centuries, goes insane. You gut him yourself out of self-defense, and the Matrona praises you with knowing, faceted oculars.

* * *

“How long have you been here?” you dare to ask one auxiliatrix, gray-haired and wrinkled, her hands lumpy with scars from an untold number of irritable grubs.

“Don’t know for sure,” she replies in a thin, reedy voice. “I stopped counting after the tenth generation.”

That’s how all the old women count the passage of time, in the ten-sweep cycle of generations passed through the Mother Grub’s primary sphincter. Something in you goes cold and hard. You don’t ask anymore.

* * *

To be a servant to the Mother Grub, you mustn’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. That’s the first rule they drill into you, knee deep in rainbow afterbirth and other unspeakable excretions. Everyone vomits, their first time in the Pit. You’re no exception.

The second rule is to never ever ever vomit on the Mother Grub, unless you want a chainsaw through your blasphemous torso. Two acolytes are slaughtered this way in the same perigree, their blood repurposed for dye, their corpses repurposed for meat. The Mother Grub is always so, so hungry, and there’s only so much mercy to dispense down here.

* * *

Curiosity made you morbid, in the perigrees before your lusus’ passing. As far as you could tell, there is only one other assignment in Her Condescension’s armies with a mortality rate to match the auxiliatrices. A thousand thousand occupations stretching across the solar system, and only quadriplegic batteries can relate.

Helmsmen burn up in electrical fires, in the radiant whipcrack flares of distant stars, in a ruthless blaze of enemy fire, rendered so much dull meat by their very own overloaded psionics. Stories claim that wetware can pilot a dead helmsman’s mummified torso for sweeps and sweeps out in the cold reaches of space, long after the life support gives out. Horrible, yes. But at least a helmsman has a chance to rebel, to throw themselves screaming into the sucking void of a black hole, to fight the yoke that stole their arms and legs from them.

There is no such thing as choice for your kind, for the will-be rainbow drinking servants to a mother of monsters. There is only the thirst, and a timeline stretching on through the sweeps, and on, and on. So the Mother wishes, so the Empress decrees.

* * *

You’re eight sweeps old when the Matrona comes to your tiny respiteblock and says, “It’s time.”

You’re eight sweeps old when you are taken out into the sunlight again, after two sweeps below ground. You’re blinded, and crying with something tangled in you, relief and grief and loneliness and other emotions you can’t find the names for. You’d forgotten the feel of sunlight. You’d forgotten.

You’re eight sweeps old when the Matrona heaves her twisting, swollen form to tower above you and her assistants, and decrees that you have earned the right to be called handmaid to the Mother, to wear the silken robes of an auxiliatrix, to bear the black tattoos that will stand out as warning to any who dare raise a weapon against you.

You’re eight sweeps old. Other trolls are earning their scuttlebuggy licenses, and you’ll be a slave the rest of your life.

* * *

 

 

 


End file.
